User Comment Rodeo: Multiple Choice City

The UCR Mk.II picked up a hugely lucrative article about a social studies professor who forced her entire second year sociology class into taking a geography pop quiz. Just a purely innocent decision which had no loaded stakes, made by a disinterested, scientific-minded professor with no agenda up her sleeve – forced on a classroom of modern students. Said class failed dismally at accurately labeling countries, provinces, capitols, and even broad geographical regions. The UCR Mk.II almost crashed analyzing the over 200 comments. The irony sensor burned out too many times, and I had to deactivate it lest I ran out of spares.

It seemed to me (and still seems to me) a monstrous project, but I will gladly take it on. There is nothing more entertaining than watching idiots go at their bogeys, and watching the poor moderates waste their time. What's really important, in the end, is that everyone tends to just have fun. So kick back, get a stiff drink, forget how old or young you are, and indulge in some senseless ageism. And remember: more than 200 hundred comments resulted from poor test scores about an unrelated subject in what is a small sample of post-secondary students. This is, in more ways than one, an example of why the west is withering and how the internet is making it worse (or making it appear worse). Don't get offended, let's go on a rodeo:

The comments flew in fast and heavy. Reading them almost caved-in my sense of hope. It was brutal. I missed some doozies, no doubt, but there is never time to think when it comes to a User Comment Rodeo. There is only action. There is only the lassoing of choice screengrabs, and hoping they turn out to be priceless. I warn ye who would read this: this is going to be lengthy and uncomfortable, and the levels of ageism, ignorance, and bigotry unveiled herein will drive you into hysteria. If you had any faith, in the young or old, turn back now. The world needs your optimism more than ever. As for me: I don't care, I'm not even paid to do this. Maybe I'll get a shot or two in.

You know what's kind of depressing? You don't? I – Ah, fuck it. I prefer cuss-words anyway, since they make a solid point, frighten puritans and squares, and require almost no intelligence to be used effectively. The internet can still educate. It can also mislead, trivialize, infantilize, and stupefy. Reader, mark well the words of these and following User Comments. Note the vast problems they bring up, and their generally piss-poor sentence construction. Ah, the familiar smells of lazy rhetoric and half-baked idiocy. Is this crisis in education new? Is this a beautiful moment in our collective existence? Will the bleating objections of the masses lead to a new era of mental rigor?

These were the 'upvotes' in reddit-speak (RIP Swartz, I never knew ye, but you deserved better). These were the king comments. These were choice, juicy, apropos, and insightful beyond all the rest. Observe the beautiful spectre of ageism rising from the rabble. One can hardly blame students who are prejudged en masse as morons, merely for existing in a troubled and complex era and for their casual use of advanced electronic devices. It seems as if everyone has given up on them. Everyone except for the oilsands, that is – and when one is scientifically illiterate, one eats up greenwashing with both hands, and feels great about it. The modern explosion of ideologues is due to lack of mental rigor, but if education was so impeccable in the 50's, 60's, and 70's then why are so many middle-aged people so insufferable in their harmful, hateful, and ignorant opinions – why are they so vulnerable to fast-food politics, misinformation, and ideology? Look what they threw away to live comfortably. It's cute, because the coming generations get to live in not only mental, but also economical, physical, and environmental squalor. No wonder they don't give a fuck.

The Unpublished Writer

There's really no worse type of writer. There are hack writers, there are pretentious litterateurs, there are boring scholarly writers, there are award winners, there are profound writers, there are dead writers, there are exciting but empty pulp writers, and there are amateur writers who fund 200 copy runs out of pocket and sell most of them to friends and family and get interviewed in small town newspapers. All of those writers are doing what they love and are not worried about tomorrow: they produce, sometimes they get published, often they are the victims of overrating and hype. For the most part they are just adding to the colossal pile of wasted paper that represents literature in situ.

Then there are unpublished writers. Like cockroaches, they are headless survivors, unable to feed on their aspirations, often orphaned from inspiration, hiding in the shadows and mostly consuming (when they can, headless and all) and producing filth. It's impossible to really understand how many unpublished writers there are, or what drives them. Beyond merest subsistence, this type of writer has few goals that are concrete. A poem-a-day work quota, three hours of prose/day, or half a screenplay each night are not unbeknownst to the unpublished writer, but they are better acquainted with day-jobs and drinking binges and hopelessness. When they set down to work on half-forgotten characters and plots, these poor souls get caught in a vicious cycle of re-reading and compulsive editing. They are procrastinators, and in fact their relation to cockroaches is facile and untrue.

The cockroaches, at least, get published and exist in the tedious middle-ground of writerly success: readings, signings, 10-15k a year plus some royalties if they're lucky,  and maybe some articles and exposure pieces to round out the old portfolio. They could go into television or radio writing. They could go into various types of copy writing. Marketing and advertising are the prime escape vectors, but times are hard. Sometimes they're shortlisted for a prize and their cachet goes up for a while and they entertain visions of success.

Compare this to the spider that is the unpublished writer: day job madness, late nights, drugs, hair-pulling typing escapades with open source word processors. They see themselves as hopeless moonlighters. Somewhere in an immense tangled web of wasted promise, these writers slowly produce tortured works that are blurred with self-revelation and inconsistent style. Then silence for weeks or even years. Inspiration comes brightly and passes quickly and leaves no marks. No, the unpublished writer is wretched, and each year passes without a printed work or anything noteworthy for the portfolio. Queries are shot down in flames, credentials are nonexistent and mocked, routes to success are suggested, and the book is closed.

And another year passes, and with it any hope of true and honest publication. All they ask for – these withered shells, who write from their soul, who wouldn't use a vanity publisher if they were paid to, whose every word is wearied and grim – is a spot at the corpse-crowded table where the hacks drink greedily and pontificate about saleability and audience, where the old guard hoard awards, where the bright new prodigies bullshit openly, and where the eyes of the reading public are focused like the glimmering eyes of wolves in the dark... yes, the reading public, waiting for their three or four inspired works per decade, habitual readers who yearn for something new – something, perhaps, that has been overlooked, a supposedly worthless bauble in the cold, dying grasp of the unpublished writer.

New Year's Evil

Funny how short-lived my enthusiasm for a new year is. I think we went wrong by celebrating an arbitrary point in our collective orbit (good band name), and then by getting drunk about it, and again by making a big deal about how and where we get drunk for it. This is the classic loser's offensive remark: "I go to sleep at 10:00 PM because, you know, what's the point?"

It's a weak position and would not get you voted into office, and complements the life of anyone over a certain age living in warm places, or anyone who works New Year's Day and isn't extreme enough to make it through a shift hungover. I mean entirely to brag by saying that  I worked an entire shift in a retail store with no backup, one day, while I was hung over enough to be sickened by rosewater. Fun fact: since referencing hangovers and New Year's, this article has gotten 300% more predictable.

I've more or less given up on holidays, myself. I still participate, but the illusion has failed me. And, really, the best perspective on the so-called "holiday season" is a cynical one, because it means you won't be disappointed in anything, from the tacky advertising to the annoying advertising to the repetitive advertising to the heartrending advertising for charities or even the edgy advertising for cars. Cynical people also don't act surprised when the mall is busy, because the mall is always busy anyways, and only an idiot would think otherwise.

It really does seem that this arbitrary point in the orbit was picked by the northern elite to ensure that their subjects have something to look forward to, whilst they sip 500 year-old cognac out of opulent vessels and bask in the warmth of a paper-money fire. I actually understand this behavior, because Christmas is the great time of retail up-trickle economics, when the midwealthy get their yearly bonuses. When the midwealthy go out to buy luxury products on boxing day, that money trickles up again to the elite, who sometimes have to make the heartbreaking decision to burn older stacks of money in order to be able to store the new. Some of them even have to deal with the stress of renovating their overlarge money safes.

For regular little people, a bit of stress arises from the hope that gifts given are either appreciated for their inherent value or useful to whomever they are gifted to. Also I see that my decision not to slavishly post on this blog was a mistake, because my whole readership evaporated. I just checked the stats, and am impressed that the numbers held out as long as they did.

Yeah, I've got peanuts for material on this blog, but I've explained that I am a shoddy blogger. I'll do a lot better this year, I promise.